This blog is about my new Civil War history, Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union.

Friday, May 23, 2014

First edition: war news and a two-headed pig

The first Monitor front page, courtesy of New Hampshire Historical Society.

One hundred fifty years ago today, on May 23, 1864, daily
journalism arrived in Concord.

Under the front-page headline “Concord Daily Monitor” the newspaper’s
proprietors wrote: “The undersigned, feeling that our State Capital demands and
ought to sustain a Daily Paper, propose to supply that want by the issue of an
Evening Journal with the above name.”

P. Brainard Cogswell had no editorial duties when
at the start but was soon forced to take them up.

The proprietors were P. Brainard Cogswell and George H.
Sturtevant, printers well known in the city. Nine months earlier Cogswell had
gone with the governor’s son on a mission of mercy to collect the sick and bury
the dead of the 16th New Hampshire Volunteers. Sturtevant’s younger brother
Edward, a printer and later Concord’s night constable before the war, had been
the state’s first volunteer. He was killed at Fredericksburg in 1862.

For their new Concord
Daily Monitor, Cogswell and Sturtevant promised to produce a first edition
before 2:30 p.m. each day to make the trains headed north and south. This paper
would include “all the intelligence” available from the Boston morning papers. Home
subscribers would receive a second edition printed at 5. At a cost of $5 a
year, it would be cheaper and earlier than the Boston evening papers.

The publishers’ timing was poor, their luck sour. The
governor, Joseph A. Gilmore, had strong-armed 40 local men into guaranteeing a
total of $3,000 to support the new capital daily, but only half that amount was
ever raised. Like other necessary printing commodities, the price of white
paper spiked to 27 to 30 cents a pound because of the war. Page composition
cost more than ever.

The two publishers were to produce the paper but leave the
content to hired guns from Massachusetts. J.M.W. Yerrinton, a Boston stenographer
of high repute, came north to cover the Legislature. Gilmore invited William S.
Robinson, clerk of the Massachusetts House, to be the editor, and Robinson took
the job.

"Warrington" didn't stay long.

Robinson was a 45-year-old former Whig who had slid easily
into the new Republican Party during the 1850s. He had written under the pen
name “Warrington” and edited the Courier
in Lowell. His biographer wrote that Gilmore was seeking a strong, independent
voice, not “a mere tool to a faction,” although he also wanted “an uncompromising
advocate” for the Union cause and the Lincoln administration.

The hiring of these seasoned outsiders would help make the Monitor “a live paper, and a permanent credit to our City,” Cogswell and
Sturtevant wrote. They promised daily news from Concord, surrounding towns and local
soldiers at the front.

“It will be a thoroughly independent sheet – fearless in its
exposure of intrigue and corruption and ‘bound to swear to the words of no
master,’ ” they wrote.

The day’s news

The most prominent story in the four-page first edition of
the Monitor was the Boston Journal’s account of the death of
Nathaniel Hawthorne four days earlier. Hawthorne had died in the night in a
Plymouth hotel with his friend Franklin Pierce sleeping fitfully a few feet
away.

The Monitor was a
Republican paper, its editor an anti-slavery man. Cogswell, the co-publisher,
who was from Henniker, had once lived in the household of Parker Pillsbury,
Concord’s leading abolitionist. Pierce, a pro-peace, pro-compromise Democrat
who also lived in Concord, had long served as a whipping boy for Republicans.
But when Robinson wrote a follow-up about Hawthorne’s funeral, he gave Pierce
the benefit of the doubt.

“This friendship is a
mystery, which ought to be sacred from scrutiny,” he wrote, “and we have a
right to presume that it was honorable to both parties to it.”

John D. Cooper of Concord remained in the 2nd
New Hampshire till after the war ended
but fell ill and died in a Baltimore hospital
on Oct. 30, 1865.

The war news in first Monitor
included a letter from John D. Cooper of Concord, adjutant of the 2nd New
Hampshire Volunteers, sharing the latest from the regiment.

Cooper had survived a gunshot through the lung at second
Bull Run and was hit a second time at Gettysburg. Now he reported that among
those killed at Drewry’s Bluff, a key point in Richmond’s defenses, was
43-year-old Private Charles O. Gould. One of the Prescott brothers, who made
organs in Concord, was Gould’s brother-in-law.

On May 16, the day before Cooper wrote, the 2nd’s boy
colonel, 22-year-old Edward L. Bailey, had ordered the regiment to throw up
breastworks in a heavy fog. When the rebels attacked, the order saved many
lives. “He may be a democrat,” Cooper wrote of Bailey, “but I know he is a
true, loyal soldier, who has heroically performed his whole duty to his
country.”

Luther F. Locke, a Nashua doctor, wrote the Monitor about helping out at a hospital
at Fort Monroe, Va. Among the many New Hampshire soldiers there, he saw Maj.
Jesse Angell of the 10th New Hampshire. A ball had hit the buckle of Angell’s belt,
knocked his sword to the ground and ricocheted through his abdomen and out the
back. Angell still hoped to return to battle, but he was sent home a few months
later.

Locke also ran into 49-year-old Harriet Patience Dame, the
angel of the 2nd New Hampshire. “I do not see how anyone can well do more,”
Locke wrote of her.

Harriet P. Dame, 2nd New Hampshire

At the start of the war, Dame had taken several young soldiers
with measles into her boarding house at Main and Montgomery streets in Concord.
Then she signed up as a nurse and accompanied the 2nd New Hampshire to the
front.

Dame never took a day off during the war, nursing the men and comforting
them in any way she could.

When Locke saw her, she was passing out strawberries to sick
and wounded soldiers, but he believed her greatest gift to them was writing
letters home for wounded men. Had he stayed a few weeks longer, Locke would
have seen her taking on the severest cases brought in from the slaughter-field
at Cold Harbor.

Because Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign had begun in
the Virginia back-country, the Monitor
carried long casualty lists. The list in the first edition for three New
Hampshire regiments in Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s 9th Corps filled more than
two columns.

Two days later, the paper ran a list of equal length.

A two-headed pig

As much as war news dominated the paper, the publishers did
not ignore the standard fare of journalism. One brief local report disclosed
that the two-headed pig brought to town by Elliott Chickering had been sent for
preservation to a Boston taxidermist. The Monitor
reported the speculation that, once the pig was stuffed, P.T. Barnum was
interested in acquiring it for his American Museum on Broadway in New York
City.

Another brief piece told the tale of a supposed female
soldier. Late one night, a Concord police constable found a woman wandering the
city streets. She had arrived on the morning train from Boston and had no place
to stay. She identified herself as Mrs. Frank Claton, 30 years old. She told the officer she had served 22 months
with a western regiment before her gender was discovered and she was booted out.
Her husband, a member of the same regiment, had been killed in battle the
previous summer, she said.

The constable allowed Mrs. Claton, or whoever she was, to
sleep in the station house.

The 1819 State House needed repairs, raising Manchester's hopes of becoming the state capital.

One reason the daily Monitor
debuted the last week of May was to report more fully on the coming legislative
session. Concord had a special interest in that year’s agenda. In 1863
legislators dissatisfied with access, space and working conditions at the 44-year-old
State House had requested proposals to expand and enhance it. They had also
suggested that any other city with good railroad service propose building a new
State House and becoming New Hampshire’s capital.

Seizing the moment, politicos and businessmen in Manchester
raised $500,000 by loan to build a State House there. Manchester, they argued,
was closer to the state’s population center than Concord and had better
railroad connections and a better depot.

The new Monitor stuck
up for its city. It informed readers of the details of Manchester’s enticements,
urged Concord leaders to make a counter-offer and printed any insult from
Manchester or support for Concord from papers around the state.

In the end, Concord remained the capital. The city put up $100,000
to pay for State House improvements. The old green dome came off, and a new,
larger one went up. More space was added for upstairs committee rooms. The city
put through Capitol Street to better delineate the plaza around the State
House.

Though late to the game, the Monitor contributed to Concord’s victorious outcome. To a newspaper
whose origins lay in political strife, such a fight came naturally.